My forty years of friendship with Thomas Merton
Nothing among human things has such power to keep our gaze fixed ever more intensely upon God, than friendship for the friends of God.
—Simone Weil, “Waiting for God”
Friendship is the first and most important thing, and is the true cement of the Church built by Christ.
—Thomas Merton, “Striving Towards Being”
Can we have friends among the dead? Is it possible to have a friendship with someone you have never met? Can you be friends with a person who never knew you even existed?
If the answer to these questions is yes, then I am friends with Thomas Merton—and you may well be, too.
I met Merton the way most of us have: through his writing. Our friendship began in a most accidental way, when a photocopy of his poem “Elegy for a Monastery Barn” drifted off the bookshelf in my English Department office I shared with a colleague. As a young literature professor and a practicing poet, I was, and still am, ever on the lookout for voices, poems and poets who are new to me.
Of course, I had heard Merton’s name before. As an educator interested in the Catholic intellectual tradition, I knew him to be a great contemplative and spiritual master. In addition, beyond Catholic circles, Merton is famous for his activism, albeit of a literary kind. His writing critiqued the materialism of mid-20th-century American society, opposed the Cold War and proliferation of nuclear weapons, and championed the civil rights movement. Along with the prominent Catholic activists Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, S.J., Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, and from within the walls of Gethsemani Abbey Monastery in rural Kentucky, Merton challenged American complacency and became one of the keepers of the conscience of his era.
Even so, when his poem was lifted from its dusty shelf by a light gust of wind from the open window and landed on my desk, it arrived like a gift. I recognized in Merton’s poem the voice of a fellow traveler and fellow searcher, a Catholic writer attentive to the world and the ways in which divine presence is manifest in the ordinary places and spaces around us, a poet who knew instinctively that beauty and holiness are inextricably intertwined and who had forged a language to express that mystery. By accident, I had made a discovery that would change the course of my life as a poet, a scholar and a teacher. Thus began a friendship that would last for the next 40 years.
As with most friendships, ours evolved gradually over time. After this first introduction, I immersed myself in Merton’s writing. That summer I made a concentrated effort to obtain and read every poem Merton ever wrote—or, at least, as many as I could find. This reading of his poems spilled over into reading his prose about poetry, his critical essays on other poets
(whose work I also sought out) and, perhaps most enjoyably, the letters he exchanged with other writers. I was steeping myself in Merton, marveling at how he managed to be both a faithful Catholic and a serious artist who created work that seamlessly blended his art
and his faith. I too was a young poet and a Catholic, and I wanted to learn how to do what he had done.
One of the many things I discovered was that Merton’s faith and his art were not only inextricably linked, but they flowed from the same fountain (to mix a metaphor). In his celebrated autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, wherein he tells the story of his conversion to Catholicism as a student at Columbia University and his discovery of his vocation as a monk, Merton confesses: “I had never been able to write verse before I became a Catholic. I had tried, but I had never really succeeded.” Seen through the eyes of his new faith, Merton perceived the world in a radically different way.
In his essay “Poetry and Contemplation,” Merton writes:
All good Christian poets are then contemplatives in the sense that they see God everywhere in His creation and in His mysteries, and behold the created world as filled with signs and symbols of God. To the true Christian poet, the whole world and all the incidents of life tend to be sacraments—signs of God, signs of His love working in the world.
This distinctive, sacramental vision—what the late theologian David Tracy refers to as “the analogical imagination” in his book bearing that title—was fully apparent in Merton’s work.
Merton made a grand entrance into my imaginative and intellectual life, and he also, perhaps inevitably, made an entrance into my classroom. His Collected Poems, as well as Striving Towards Being (a collection of letters he exchanged with the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz), selected essays and excerpts from his journals, and Seven Storey Mountain all became a permanent part of the syllabus for my Catholic studies seminars devoted to the Catholic imagination. Every semester, Merton is one of a number of Catholic writers who accompany us along a journey toward enlightenment, his wisdom books leading us in the direction we ourselves need to go.
His books are the first we read, and after we finish them, he continues with us as companion and fellow traveler. At the end of the semester, when I ask my students who among the 12 or so authors we have read is their favorite (all of them being brilliant, beautiful writers, several of whom are more recent and, one might think, more relevant to the lives of 21st-century 20-year-olds) most of them name Merton. Strangely, wonderfully, my friend has become their friend, too.
Walking in Merton’s Footsteps
In 2015, during the yearlong celebration of Merton’s birth centenary, I had occasion to make a physical journey, as well as an intellectual and spiritual one, with my students and Thomas Merton. We attended a vespers service at Corpus Christi Church on 121st Street in Manhattan, a couple of blocks from Columbia University. This was the church Merton stumbled into one Sunday, where he observed Mass for the first time, where he later returned and introduced himself to the pastor, became a catechumen and was finally received into the Catholic Church. After vespers, Corpus Christi’s then-pastor and Merton aficionado, Father Raymond Rafferty, kindly led my students and me to the baptistry in the rear of the church where Merton was baptized, unlocked the wrought-iron gates, and invited us to gather around the font where Merton had been welcomed into the church. Father Rafferty read aloud passages from his dog-eared copy of Seven Story Mountain wherein Merton describes with great emotion the joy of his conversion and his gratitude for Corpus Christi, as well as for the members of the Columbia community who helped him along his path.
My students were greatly moved, as am I whenever I return to that humble church, to walk in Merton’s footsteps and sense something of his presence in this place where such a momentous occasion took place in our friend’s life. Here in the midst of a bustling, busy, dirty city, in November 1938, at a time when he was experiencing depression and anxiety about his own future as well as the future of the world, the 23-year-old Merton found holy ground and chose to follow a new path without knowing where it would lead.
That evening, my small group of students admired his courage and his spirit of adventure, as many of my students do when they read his books—perhaps even more keenly than I, given their closeness in age to the young, newly baptized Merton and their own sense of uncertainty as they try to discern their paths in life.
When Thomas Merton entered the Trappist monastery on Dec. 10, 1941, it surely seemed to him that his life of semi-nomadic wandering had come to a close. His many years of travel and rootlessness culminated in his simultaneously unlikely and yet somehow inevitable decision to enclose himself within the walls of Gethsemani Abbey. Here he intended to live out his life peacefully as a priest, a writer and a contemplative. If one reads only Merton’s autobiography, one would assume this is how his story ends. Reading the rest of his voluminous work, however, one quickly discovers otherwise. It does not take long for Merton’s spirit of curiosity and restlessness of heart to trouble the placid waters of monastic life and urge him to engage with the world he supposedly left behind and to try to find another, more satisfactory place to spend his days.
Many of us know the rest of the narrative: his cultivation of friendships with famous writers and thinkers beyond the monastery; his relocation from the monastic house where his brother monks lived to solitude in his “hermitage” (a shed repurposed as a writer’s retreat); his desire to participate in conferences and public events about the spiritual life and his abbot’s refusal to let him; his brief love affair with a young student nurse he met during a hospital stay for a back operation; his renunciation of her and his recommitment to his vows; and, finally, permission from his new, more liberal-thinking abbot to travel to Bangkok for a conference on monasticism in December of 1968—a trip that would prove fatal to Merton, as he would die from a heart attack after being electrocuted by a faultily wired fan. The irony of Merton’s death has long troubled his admirers. That his first journey out into the world after being cloistered for so long should end so abruptly and violently, that this brilliant writer should be silenced at the comparatively young age of 53, that the death of such an extraordinary man should be so mundane and prosaic, seems like a plot from a Flannery O’Connor story. But as both Merton and O’Connor knew, truth is even stranger than fiction.
Merton’s Last Chapter
About a year ago, I received an invitation to give some lectures in Anchorage, Alaska. Like the Thomas Merton poem that drifted onto my desk 40 years ago, the email arrived on my office computer like an unexpected gift. I had never been to Alaska—a state over 4,000 miles away from New York City, where I live and work—and it was very unlikely that I would ever go there. (I should confess here, in the spirit of David Foster Wallace, that I am not a fan of cruises.) And so I said yes, agreeing to give a series of lectures and poetry readings at Alaska Pacific University and a local parish focused on the great “saints” of the Catholic imagination, including the likes of Dante, Bruce Springsteen, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor and, of course, Thomas Merton.
On the second leg of our long journey, a flight from Minneapolis to Anchorage, we soon left behind the familiar green prairies and the big blue Mississippi of America’s heartland and flew over some of the most lonely and remote landscapes I had ever seen: miles and miles of creased and creviced, snow-encrusted mountains stretched as far as the horizon. There were no city lights, no cars or signs of commerce. No living creatures visibly stirred down there. Even the rivers seemed frozen in place. I was reminded of Melville’s description in Moby-Dick of polar regions wherein everything one beholds is unrelentingly white, a color that is perceived as colorless and yet contains all of the colors of the spectrum, rendering it a paradox and a mystery, both eloquent and menacingly mute: “there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows.”
I viscerally felt why Alaska is often regarded as America’s final frontier. Most of it is wild and untamed. One half of the state’s inhabitants live in the Anchorage area, leaving the rest of the state only sparsely populated. The population of the entire state is 740,000, whereas the population of New York City alone is 8.5 million. The area of the state of Alaska is 12 times the size of New York State and constitutes nearly one fifth of the land mass of the continental United States. In short, Alaska is enormous, and I felt its grandeur and my smallness even before we landed.
Many writers before me have remarked on the strangeness and otherness of Alaska: its majestic mountains, its active volcanos, the spectacular light, its skies full of eagles, its waters full of whales, a place where moose and bears wander through the towns. Alaskans are justly proud of the beauty and wildness of their home state, as I discovered upon meeting my hosts and the people who attended my lectures. I suppose I expected much of this, having read about Alaska before traveling there. What I did not expect was to discover that my longtime friend Thomas Merton, who was decidedly not native to Alaska, had been there before me.
On the evening of Mardi Gras, after my lecture, over a meal of jambalaya and homemade King Cakes (thanks to my kind host, a New Orleans transplant), a member of the parish approached me to tell me about Merton’s sojourn in her beloved state. In the course of our conversation, I would discover that she, too, was a friend of Merton, and, in fact, had written a memoir about the unlikely intersection of their lives in this far-flung place, We Are All Poets Here. I was astonished and amazed, eager to know the story behind his unlikely visit to one of the most remote regions in the world. To follow in his footsteps in New York City was one thing; to find myself following him in Alaska was quite another.
I was delighted to discover that Merton—as was so typical of him, the relentless writer—kept notebooks and a journal during his Alaskan sojourn. These, along with some letters he wrote during his travels and some lectures he gave at the various religious communities and parishes he visited, are collected in Thomas Merton in Alaska, a slim volume in which he attests passionately that Alaska is the ideal place for him to live. Disenchanted with his life at Gethsemani Abbey, feeling overwhelmed by the steady stream of visitors his fame had brought him, Merton longed to retreat from the world to live out his true vocation as a hermit and a contemplative.
En route to the conference in Bangkok, Merton explored a variety of places he might escape to. Among these, Alaska seemed to offer the perfect combination of isolation, spartan living and immense beauty. In the course of two weeks, from Sept. 17 to Oct. 2, 1968, he visited several possible sites for his hermitage, flying over the stunningly ascetic Alaskan landscape, and vowed to return. Sadly, he never would, and so it remains a tantalizing question whether Merton would have made good on his promise, returned to this wild, untamed and sacred space, and disappeared from the world’s stage.
This question haunts me still, along with other related ones. Would Merton have been happy there, so far from the great art that paved the way to his conversion in Rome, forever exiled from communication with friends, from the centers of civilization that fed his imagination in France, England, Italy and America? Would he finally find the peace that he was looking for?
These questions are unanswerable by means of the ordinary routes of logic and reason, but they are, perhaps, approachable through poetry. Upon my return to my ordinary life in my ordinary city, a city Merton both adored and rejected, I wrote a series of five poems, dedicated to my poet friend, that try to tell the untold story of “Merton in Alaska,” each of which begins with his own words culled from his Alaska journal. The first and last of those poems, which appear below, attempt to trace the trajectory of Merton’s journey, acknowledging his adventurous spirit as well as his impractical idealism, which goaded him to continue searching for what, finally, could not be grasped. The poems offered me—and offer all of us, I hope—the opportunity to engage in conversation with our long dead friend, who still lives in his work and who now occupies his place amid the communion of saints. Merton first spoke to me as a poet, and it is a joy and a privilege to speak to him now, poet to poet, friend to friend, in our shared language of poetry.
“Merton in Alaska”
I.
We took off an hour late, big plane full of children, heading for Anchorage, Tokyo, and Seoul. Flew up slowly out of the dark into the brilliant light, this Bardo of pure sky.
—Thomas Merton, The Alaska Journal, September 17, 1968
How full of hope you were, leaving home,
escaping earth to find an island of your own.
The hermit’s life in tame Gethsemani
not at all what you imagined it would be.
Now you eye white mountains from the sky,
lakes that shimmer and shine like bits of broken glass,
mile after mile after mile of icy
tundra where no human foot cares to pass
beyond the borders of comfort and ease,
precisely the place you yearn to be,
its wilderness speaking to your wild heart.
Long years you pursued the difficult art
of loneliness done. Here you’ll rest your head.
Not knowing in 3 months’ time you will be dead.
*****
V.
“I can’t say with certitude that I think I am called to be a hermit here, but I do believe it is a very real possibility and that I must keep it in mind and look into it further and perhaps make a decision on my return from Asia.”
—Thomas Merton, The Alaska Letters, September 26, 1968
One thing you were sure of—that you’d return,
though not in the box that they sent you in.
Despite your wisdom, so much to learn
about what we can count on. Nothing.
The bears, volcanoes, rickety planes,
none of these dangers would do you in.
Bad teeth, gangrene, the aches and pains
you suffered could not clip your wings.
Like some Trappist Icarus, you flew far
beyond the monastery walls,
surveyed the world and loved it for
its own poor sake. You heard the call
and followed where God’s voice led you.
There was nothing, nothing you would not do.
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